Category Archives: Rant

 

03Oct

Rant: custom design and development

Ok I am not bitching about everybody who offers custom design and development, but I see a lot of so called web design companies offering this to clients but then clearly sell on other peoples work.

The worst case are people that sell a static design to a client, then rip off the HTML code from another persons site and customise it a little. This has happened a few times to me now (the ones I am aware of!) and one case they even ripped off the tracking code, which sort of gave the game away.

The other more common case are companies that use out of the box applications / open source scripts such as Joomla. They sell the website, find a free or premium theme customise it a little and claim it is bespoke.

I am sorry but in my eyes that is not custom or bespoke! That is re-selling another persons design!

I personally think a bespoke design is something that has been created from scratch, most likely in PSD form then sliced and coded into (x)HTML. Then depending on the job it maybe integrated into an application. This means the client gets the exact design they want, if they don’t like a colour or layout they can change it during the design process. Once they are happy with the design they sign it off and it then is coded.

Some companies are so lazy (or stupid) they don’t even change the bloody name of the theme they used! One example recently (I won’t name names) did an e-commerce site in Joomla. I viewed the source and saw the theme name gk_eshoptrix_2. A quick Google search led me to Gavick.com. A quick look at his demos and I found the theme in question. The ONLY alterations done were the shop name, and 4 images. I am assuming the theme was supplied in PSD so it probably would of taken 30 minutes to do!

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying people can’t do this, or that people can’t take design ideas from other sites. But if you are selling a template site to a client, it is only fair the client knows this first!

03Oct

What’s your experience with recruitment agencies? Do you ever use them?

My company is only small, we are a team of 5 and most of us have known each other for a while. So the whole recruiting process has never been much of an issue for us.

The last lad we took on we did advertise the role, we decided a graduate would be best, so he can be trained up to work how we want him to not how someone else trained him too. It was a bit of a pain finding someone but not that hard in the end, more time consuming.

However the idea of using an agency never crossed our minds, I am not that clued up how agencies work but I believe they take a % of the wage, so if I offered 15k the agency might take 15% of that (please correct me if I am wrong). Now this seems VERY expensive for a small company as the employee would walk away with £12,750 so not likely to accept the job offer and the agency would get £2250.

Obviously for a larger company, or someone needing staff for shorter period of time I can see the benefit, but for a small company why would I want to do this?

Then there is the fact that I get 2-3 calls a day from people who claim the specialise in SEO recruitment. Funny how they all seem to say that. When I was advertising for a job, I would get 5-10 calls a day. Even when you tell them you don’t use agencies and not to call back, they still call back 3 months later!

The fact that agencies are so aggressive  is the main reason I don’t like them, I am sure there are many benefits of using a GOOD agency and the facts and figures I quoted above regarding their fees is probably completely inaccurate however I have never had the desire to find out more as I despise them that much!!!

Does anyone have any positive agency experience? Especially for the SEO industry?

I know Lyndon Antcliff has recently brought the matter up. The job he is advertising is 70k + comm + benefits so if my company was large enough to pay an SEM manager that kind of money and I knew I had a experience SEO recruiting for me I probably could justify the agency fees.